The Revised Triangle of Life

The Triangle of Life is a pyramid composed of three segments—two base blocks and a tip—in three different colours; black and white form the base, grey forms the tip. In the last few years, I’ve managed to allocate five different conceptual meanings to the structure.

I’m sure I will unearth and create more layers of meaning in the future. But a few days ago, I altered the structure itself. I added something to the centre.

The above meanings still hold, but now, at the centre is an empty triangle. That triangle—which is colourless, transparent, and thus hard to represent—signifies the abyss at the centre of human understanding. It is the void, the nothingness, the unknown and the unknowable. It is the question that can never be answered, the matter than can be neither evaluated nor measured. If someone were to ask me what each part of The Revised Triangle of Life represented, I could answer them. “The black triangle is action, body, physical courage. The white triangle is reflection, mind, intellectual courage. And the grey triangle is the synthesis of these things.” They would then ask, “But what about the triangle at the centre? What does that mean?” To which I would reply, truthfully, “That which I don’t and can never know.”